The Disillusioned American Dream In The Context Of The Consumerculture

The American Dream is called the American Ideal or the American Myth as well. It is not only a popular topic in American culture study, but also a significant factor in acquiring a better understanding of American culture. Throughout the American history, it can be found that the American Dream has been ingrained in the inner hearts of the American people, appearing as an important theme in American literature as well as the central ideology in ordinary Americans' minds. For over 200 years, generations of American writers convey the theme of the American Dream in different forms through their works, some inspiring and some illusory. As a matter of fact, the process of their creations of the American Dream is as well their own journey to pursue it. As a great American novelist, Dreiser has a much clearer awareness of the tragic illusion of the American Dream on his own dream-pursuit journey. So far, few scholars take the method of textual analysis to explore the literary theme reflected in Dreiser's literary works—the American Dream, and even no attempts are made to analyze the primary cause of the disillusioned American Dream from the perspective of the consumer culture. This conclusion was drawn according to my search results at EBSCO's Academic Search Premier (1975-2006), the National Digital Library of China and CNKI (1990-2006). Therefore, there is certain value in analyzing the American Dream reflected in Dreiser's masterpieces from the perspective of the consumer culture.Generally speaking, the consumer culture is a dynamic concept diversifying in accordance with the change of age, society, and place. It includes the consuming habit, the consuming ethics, the consuming value and the consuming aesthetic trend presented from people's consumption actions. At the end of the 19th century and the early beginning of the 20th century, America was experiencing a great shift from a productive society to a consumer one. It was the very time when the consumer culture emerged and prevailed in America. In the context of the consumer culture, in addition to caring the commodities' use value, modern American people view the purchase and consumption of commodities as the sign to show their wealth, social status and identity. As the role of consumption has been increasingly prominent in daily life, the conspicuous consumption became a vogue. In the author's view, Dreiser develops a keen insight into the tragic illusion of the American Dream since he has been strongly influenced by the consumer culture. In Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy, Dreiser has a detailed description of the consumer society imbued with desires and conspicuousness at the turn of the 20th century so as to reflect his keen reflection on the consumer society in the progress of human history.The thesis is divided into four chapters: chapter one is a brief review of the American Dream from the angles of its origin, evolution and reflection in American literature. Chapter two mainly discusses the process of Carrie and Clyde's pursuit of their American Dream so as to explore the identical theme in Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy. Chapter three gives a brief introduction to the consumer culture at first. Then based on the analysis of the consumer culture prevailing at the turn of the 20th century reflected in the two novels, this chapter explores the negative impacts the consumer culture extends on the protagonists so as to show that in the consumer culture context, the American Dream is so far away, appearing illusory. Chapter four is an exploration of Dreiser's complicated outlook on life as a person living in the consumer culture context, on the basis of which, Dreiser's keen insight into the American social and cultural themes, is to be well understood.